What the Hell? The Fate of Non-Muslims

Matthew Kaemingk:
We’ve got a really fantastic conversation coming up that I’m particularly interested in because it has to do with whether or not I’m going to heaven or hell. And I’d like to resolve that, Shadi that’s important to me. So can you tell us just a little bit about our guest and then we can start to discuss my fate?

Shadi Hamid:
Yeah. Well, I don’t know if we’re going to focus too much on your particular fate. No, we’ll see. We’ll see what happens. That’s exciting thing about this conversation. It is about one of our favorite topics, heaven, hell, and salvation. And we have a very special guest to join us to help us get our heads around how Islam views these questions around salvation. Our guest is Mohammad Hassan Khalil. He is a Professor of Religious Studies and Director of the Muslim Studies Program at Michigan State University. Mohammad is the author and editor of several books including “Islam and the Fate of Others: The Salvation Question.” Published by Oxford University Press. And I’ll just say I absolutely love this book. “Islam and the Fate of Others,” is probably the single best book I’ve read on the question of salvation from an Islamic perspective. So it’s a real honour to have you, Mohammad with us on the podcast. And of course we will include a link to that book in the show notes. So if you are interested, do please check it out.

So I was thinking maybe a good place to start would be on this very word, salvation. Because it doesn’t really have an exact equivalent in Arabic. And some might even argue that the word salvation was imported from Christianity, and now we Muslims use it quite casually. So maybe just to get us going here, Mohammad, what does salvation actually mean in the Islamic tradition and to what extent does it differ from the Christian conception of salvation?

Mohammad Hassan Khalil:
Yeah. Well first of all, thank you so much for having me and for that generous introduction. So in the Quran, the Islamic Holy Book, in the very first chapter, we read a prayer where one asks God to guide one to the upright path, a straight path, the path of those who have blessed, not of those who are objects of anger, nor of those who are astray. And throughout the Quran we see reference to this idea that one wants to be saved or averted from the fire. And one of the most famous, one of the most widely recited, often recited invocations that actually comes from the Quran itself is, “Oh Lord, our Lord grant us good in this life and the next life and save us or deliver us or protect us from the punishment of the fire.” So we see this notion of what I would consider salvation.

Now I know some people will take issue with that terminology, especially because of the Christian connection to that term, the Christian connotations. One big difference between let’s say the prevailing Islamic interpretation and a prevailing Christian interpretation is, there is no concept of original sin. And I realise as I’m saying this, there are all kinds of differences of opinion among Christians as to what that entails or this notion. But just in the Islamic context, I’ll simply say there is no concept that somebody is born with any kind of sin. But there is a notion that people tend to sin generally speaking, and there is the possibility then of punishment for those sins.

Shadi Hamid:
I think that a lot of us as Muslims, whether we were growing up in the Middle East or in my case here in the U.S. in Pennsylvania, we would hear about, and this is something like 20, 25 years ago. And there was still a lot of talk about punishment and hell, that’s something we would hear a lot of in Sunday school. And I think some of us grew up with a sense of fear and that instead of an emphasis on seeking out God’s love, what animated us was avoidance of hellfire and punishment. And certainly the Quran does talk about hell quite a lot and certainly more than I would say Christian scripture does.

Mohammad, maybe just to what extent should we emphasize hell over heaven? Another way of looking at it is to think of God’s mercy versus God’s justice. And when I say justice here, I mean that if God is just, he will punish people presumably for the bad things we did. And we can think of dictators or really horrendous individuals that we would like to see them called to justice because a lot of them will get away with it in this world. But I think the bigger question here is how much does hell really matter? How much do you think it should matter for us as Muslims?

Mohammad Hassan Khalil:
Yeah, great question. Well, first let me say that I was raised in Michigan, in East Lansing, Michigan. And I often was the only Muslim in my class at public school. And then you go to the Friday prayer or an Islamic class and you hear that all non-Muslims are going to hell. So for me, that was something that was a bit challenging. There’s a lot of cognitive dissonance there, right? On the one hand you’re hearing these are people who are condemned, and then on the other hand, you’re friends with these people, my friend Sean, he’s going to hell, he seems better than Ahmed or Mohammed or my other Muslim friends.

Now having said that, going back to your point, your question, hell does appear more often in the Quran than it does in the New Testament, for example, or the Bible in general. I would also say that heaven also appears more often in the Quran perhaps or more frequently let’s say, because the Quran is much smaller, but more frequently than in the Bible. This of course, all ties back to notions of the divine, is God a god of justice, a god of mercy? And this is interesting because what I found in doing research for this book is that there was a kind of dismissive attitude among some scholars that when Muslims emphasize God’s mercy as opposed to God’s justice, that this is a modern trend, that this is a modern trend.

What’s interesting in my own case is yeah, there were people who emphasize God’s mercy, but definitely, certainly justice was there. Justice was emphasized in the contemporary scene. But when I went back to look at these writings of earlier scholars, of course they emphasize justice, but I was struck by the significance of mercy in all their writings, especially on this issue, on the issue of the salvation of others. So mercy, and it’s probably not a surprise that mercy or Rahma would be such an important attribute. It appears at the beginning of almost every chapter of the Quran, we read Bismillah-ir-Rahman-ir-Rahim, in the name of God, the Lord of Mercy, the Bestower of Mercy. At the beginning of almost every chapter of the Quran or Surah of the Quran.

Matthew Kaemingk:
Thank you for that, Mohammad. You mentioned your story with Sean and your classmates. I wonder if you might just talk just a little bit more about why this problem of the fate of others, the fate of non-Muslims. Why that interests you, why it troubles you? We as scholars, we often write out of our experience and out of our own stories. What is it from your own story that causes this concern to really dig into the history, the theology, the belief around what is going to happen to non-Muslims when they die?

Mohammad Hassan Khalil:
When you’re listening to a Muslim preacher and the preacher conveys the point that there are some things that we can’t understand, we just have to submit. Okay, you hear that. But then some things, even though they tell you that, and even though you know as a good Muslim you’re supposed to do that, you’re supposed to submit, some things are just difficult to swallow. And for me, this notion that all non-Muslims, the vast majority of the world’s population is all going to go to hell. That … It gives pause. And for me, what really led me in this direction was reading works, encountering works of medieval scholars who were speaking of non-Muslims going to heaven. And that surprised me, and that’s kind of what led me on this path.

Matthew Kaemingk:
Okay. Now I have a question for you, and I love Shadi to get after this as well. You use the word submission, right? And submissions and obviously a very important word within Islam. As Academics, you’re called to wrestle with ideas, you’re not just supposed to submit. So I’m wondering for the two of you, how you think about the call to submit to God’s wisdom, to God’s justice, to God’s mercy, but also your own internal design as academics to wrestle with ideas. And how do you think about, when is your wrestling with ideas improper? How do you know when you have intellectually strayed into sort of an improper wrestling with these theological ideas? I want to hear from both of you on that.

Shadi Hamid:
That’s a good question, Mohammed. Do you want to take that one to start?

Mohammad Hassan Khalil:
I’d love to hear. Okay, fine. I’ll go ahead. I’ll say this. So if you believe everything is from God, the truth is from God, then the truth should be able to handle any kind of criticism or counterpoint or what have you. So my thinking is that if I really believe something to be true, I should be able to interrogate it and interrogate the heck out of it. And that should be fine, because if it’s all from God, it’s all shall true.

Anyway, having said that, as an academic, of course, I have to be careful also in the sense that I have to shut up a little bit. I have to shut any kind of wishful thinking I might have, I have to push it aside. I’ll give you an example. One of the scholars I looked at is a very famous theologian named Al-Ghazali. And Al-Ghazali has this short passage where he seems to imply that one day everybody could be saved. But he doesn’t say it, and I was tempted go to kind of say more about this passage, but I realised that was more wishful thinking and I had to sort of stop myself and restrain myself. I’ll leave it at that. I’d love to hear Shadi’s take on this.

Matthew Kaemingk:
Okay. Yeah, Shadi.

Shadi Hamid:
I think first of all, we tend to read into texts what we want to hear. And maybe that’s what Mohammad’s getting at a little bit, that when you come across a passage from Al-Ghazali that seems to suggest that everyone could be saved, we’re like, “Yes, that’s confirmation of what we want to hear.” We want to believe in a God that would be merciful in this sort of unlimited way.

And I think that for me, and I’ll just be straight up here, and I don’t think this is totally unusual for Muslims, but we’re not guaranteed heaven just by virtue of being Muslim. So I don’t necessarily wake up in the morning and think to myself, “Oh, I’m all good. I’m going to heaven, I’m saved.” That’s not quite the way that it works in Islam. And sometimes there’s even a notion that by being Muslims, we might even be held to a higher standard because we knew things that other people didn’t know, and God expects more from us and so forth.

So I think that this idea that there’s universal salvation, it’s one that I think we have to be careful with in terms of promoting that idea because if everyone’s going to heaven, then well, what’s the point of doing anything in particular of taking our religion very seriously? So there are these kinds of tensions that I think that I wrestle with. But to get to your question a little bit more directly, Matt, I don’t personally love talking too much about the creedal requirements of Islam and challenging them and doubting them and questioning them. I think that when it comes to the foundations of a religion, they’re the foundations for a reason. I think that Islam has a lot of room for debate and internal wrestling outside of those few creedal requirements.

But once you start getting into questions of like, is the Quran really from God or did Muhammad play some role in authoring it? Obviously that’s a very risky thing for a Muslim to bring up because then it runs the risk of taking you outside of the faith because to be a Muslim means by definition that you believe that every letter and word of the Quran is directly from God. And then there’s also a question of what’s the use in asking a question like, “Well, can God create a boulder that is so large that even he himself can’t carry it?” You can kind of get into these sort of odd meta questions that there’s no way to really answer them logically. And then we have to kind of acknowledge that there are certain things that are outside of our grasp, outside the grasp, but the human mind mind is limited. That’s maybe one way that I would address that.

But beyond those kinds of meta questions and the kind of foundational creedal questions, I’m more than happy to get into a debate about just about anything. And I think even on the question of heaven and hell, what’s so great about Mohammad’s book is that he does raise questions that I think most of us would’ve been like, “Oh wait, should we really be asking that question?” And one of those is, is hell eternal? And I was surprised in reading Mohammad’s book that that is actually something that medieval scholars wrestled with, and some of them had a notion that while hell might persist for ages, for thousands and thousands of years, that’s not quite the same as saying that hell will be forever in the total sense.

And maybe that’s a way to kind of put the question back to you, Mohammad. Can you tell us a little bit more about that internal debate within Islam, which I think will be surprising to many of our Muslim viewers. We do grow up with this idea that the word for forever in Arabic really does mean forever, but actually there’s other ways of interpreting the Arabic word, which suggests that it’s actually more complicated. Is that a fair description?

Mohammad Hassan Khalil:
Yes. I was just as shocked as you or I assume, when I first heard about this. I remember I was reading F.E. Peter’s, “Reader in Classical Islam.” And he had a selection from the medieval Muslim scholar, Al Zamakhshari, who was dismissing the idea that one day hell would come to an end. And I was wondering, wait a minute, Muslims were actually debating this? I mean, he was affirming the prevailing opinion that hell is indeed everlasting, but he was responding to a group of fellow Muslims, and I thought that was strange. Because I was always taught hell is everlasting. When you read most translations of the Quran, it’s right there again and again. They will remain in it forever, in hell forever.

So when I discovered that not only was there a debate, some of the most influential Muslim figures in the history of Islam, Ibn Taymiyyah, his student Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziya, and then later on people like Rashid Rida and even someone like Yusuf al-Qaradawi, these are figures who are challenging the notion, rethinking the notion of everlasting damnation. And affirming the possibility that one day every single human could be saved. Now, it could be after a long time, but the point is, is that eventually every single person makes it to heaven. And that was a big shock for me just to discover that. It was very easy to spend a lot of time reading, going through the works of Ibn Taymiyyah and others because it was all just like an exciting discovery that this even existed in the Islamic tradition.

Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah. So within the Christian tradition, we have from the very beginning a doctrine called Annihilationism, which is essentially that eventually these souls that go to hell are annihilated and hell itself ceases to exist. So there’s this sense that within this worldview, essentially hell, because it’s detached from God is unsustainable, that essentially hell would shrink and shrink and shrink as it became more and more detached from God, and then it would eventually cease to be. Because all materiality ontology depends upon God’s providence. And as God withdraws God’s self from hell, hell would sort of cease to exist. So you can find evidence of Annihilationism in Christianity, I think centuries before Islam.

I wonder as you explore Mohammed, the sort of generosity of Islam towards non-Muslims in terms of their final destination, I wonder what are the most difficult verses within the Quran or the Hadith for Muslims who want to be generous in terms of how they talk about, I mean, let’s just talk about me. So I’m a Christian, I believe in the Divinity of Christ and the Trinity. What are the toughest parts of the Quran for me as I think about whether or not I’m going to be going to hell?

Shadi Hamid:
And maybe before you get into that Mohammad, just to maybe lay out what is the mainstream position Islamically on whether Christians like Matthew are going to either hell or heaven? I mean, my own understanding, there is obviously a lot of debate, and this is like an oversimplification, but that I did always have this idea that because of one particular verse in the Quran that Christians and Jews could enter paradise or what we call people of the book because they are people who come from a lineage of scriptural revelation and therefore they are honoured in that way.

And I think there’s also a logical argument too, that if Sean is a really good person and is following God to the best of his ability and he thinks that Christianity is true, and he hasn’t really been exposed to Islam in a lot of depth or not, he hasn’t been exposed to Islam in a particularly good or positive way, it would seem odd for God to condemn him to eternal damnation for a theological error. But there’s a lot there, so feel free to take that in whatever direction.

Mohammad Hassan Khalil:
Yeah, these are big questions. I think the easiest thing to do is to categorize different Muslim scholars and Muslim thinkers and Muslims in general. We could think of there being three basic categories of Muslims on this topic, on this issue of salvation. First you have exclusivists. And of course, these categorizations, this is not something that people have used for centuries. These are modern categorizations that I’m using just out of convenience. Exclusivists say that only Muslims go to heaven, end of discussion. All non-Muslims go to hell. Then you have inclusivists. Inclusivists say, Islam is the truth, it’s the path to heaven, the primary path to heaven, but God will save sincere non-Muslims. The question becomes then who qualifies as a sincere non-Muslim? And there we find a lot of discussion and debate. Then there’s a third category, pluralists. Pluralists say, no matter what you’ve been exposed to or what you see as true or not true, there are multiple paths that are equally salvific. They are just as effective in getting you to heaven, paradise, et cetera.

Now having said that, what I found interesting about my study was it was very hard for me to find a clear-cut example of a pre-modern Muslim pluralist. Even someone like Rumi, the famous poet, there are passages where he’s criticizing a Christian for remaining Christian and not becoming Muslim. On the other hand, it was also very difficult for me to find a clear-cut example of a Muslim, and this was surprising a Muslim exclusavist. I did find one example, and that was Ibn Hazm of al-Andalus, Muslim Iberia or Muslim Spain, living in a context that was as Professor Kevin Reinhart puts it, ” [inaudible 00:24:17] with reconquista angst.” He is sort of an outlier. He says that, yeah, all non-Muslims will go to hell, otherwise, every pre-modern Muslim scholar whose writings I encountered could make some pretty strong statements, but would ultimately qualify those statements and say at the very least, if they never encountered the Islamic message properly, then they would be excused.

So now this takes us to the subject of inclusivism, that middle category. We said that the inclusivists say that only sincere non-Muslims would be saved. So who is a sincere non-Muslim? And here you find a range of views. On the one end you have people who say any non-Muslim who just never encountered the Islamic message would be excused for not being Muslim. But once they encounter the Islamic message, they would be expected to submit. That’s on the one end of the inclusivist spectrum. So that’s what I call a limited form of inclusivism.

And then on the other end, you have what I would call a more liberal form of inclusivism, where you have people who they have heard everything there is to hear about Islam, the Prophet Muhammad, et cetera, they just don’t find it compelling. They don’t find it convincing, they just don’t see it as the truth. Liberal inclusivists would say those non-Muslims would be excused for not being Muslim.

Now, to go back to Matthew’s question about passages in the Quran, that would be difficult. So exclusivists, and I should say this, in the modern era, we see exclusivists and pluralists. In the modern era, it’s pretty easy to find exclusivists and pluralists. Exclusivists to point to certain passages of the Quran, like passages that are critical of Jews and Christians. Like passages that like Surah 3:19 and Surah 3:85. These are passages that say that Islam is the only thing that is accepted by God. So the question becomes, what is Islam or Al-Islam? What does that mean? Do we use the term today to refer to the religion of the people who follow the Prophet Muhammad? But in the context of the Quran, is that how the word is being used?

Because if you look at a related term, which is Muslim, a Muslim is one who submits. In the Quran, we see Abraham is called a Muslim. Joseph is called a Muslim. And these are all people who lived long before the Prophet Muhammad. So the question becomes what does Islam really mean? So this is where you have some interesting debate, and there’s also, there are passages that criticize people who believe in the divinity of Jesus or who it depends, you have to be careful with the wording here. But passages that refer to Jesus who say that the God is the Messiah, I think is the way the Quran words it in Surah five. So these are passages that would be considered challenging. Now, there are responses to all these, but these are passages that would be considered challenging.

Matthew Kaemingk:
So on that note, Shadi, you talked about certain things that are sort of out of bounds that you don’t question in terms of your creedal aspects. It seems like there’s a lot of discussion and debate within Islam about who’s going to hell. But would you say that the existence of hell is sort of non-debatable, that is if you’re a Muslim who denies the existence of hell, that you’re sort of out of bounds?

Shadi Hamid:
I think that’s fair to say. I can’t imagine any kind of Muslim figure or scholar questioning hell’s existence. I don’t think that really exists as a position. And hell is very explicit in the Quran, I mean. And unless there are certainly people who might interpret hell in a more metaphorical sense that hell maybe in some sense is being denied communion with God, or an argument that God uses the discussion of fire and torture as a way for human beings to understand something, to get their head around it, but that it may not literally be fire in the way that we mere mortals understand it. So you might have those kinds of secondary debates around what hell actually entails. But the existence of hell is not questioned. And I think it’s fair to say that Islam would sort of crumble logically if you didn’t have both reward and punishment. If you only had reward, it doesn’t really work, there has to be something else as well. But Mohammed, do you want to add anything to that?

Mohammad Hassan Khalil:
Yeah, no, I think that’s exactly right. I mean, unless you’re accounting for, let’s say some of the philosophers and others who had very different perspectives, but among the theologians and traditional scholars, you’re absolutely right.

Matthew Kaemingk:
So this is a podcast on religion and politics, Mohammed. So I’d love to hear how politics intersects with all of these debates over what’s happening to Christians and Muslims when they die, or just any non-Muslim when they die. As you’re looking through history, but also in our contemporary world, what are the political implications of the decisions that Muslims make or the doctrines that Muslims hold about hell?

One quote that Shadi and I play with a lot and criticize a lot comes from, I think it’s Rousseau, who says, “You cannot live at peace with those you regard to be damned.” And the assumption of course is right. If you think somebody’s going to hell, you will ask the government to convert them for you because of the urgency we have to save them. So let’s get the king or the president or the dictator to force these hellbound people to convert.

So yeah, I wonder if you could talk just a bit about how you see politics intersecting with these debates that Muslims are having about our fate.

Mohammad Hassan Khalil:
Yeah. Well, I think this whole discussion is consequential. There are real world implications for this discourse, but I think we have to be careful about what those implications are. Just to give a simple example, if we assume an exclusivist mindset, someone believes all non-Muslims are going to hell, there will be real world consequences. But the question is, what are those consequences? Because on the one hand, I could be unusually nice and friendly to non-Muslims because I want them to be saved. I want them to see the light. And so I’ll be really friendly, “Hey, you want an extra cup of … ?” Just super friendly. But on the other hand, you have some who will look down upon them as the damned.

And actually this is what Sam Harris says in the end of faith, that the hijackers on 9/11, they viewed the people there in the towers as just fuel for the eternal fires of God’s justice. And this is a passage that I criticize in the book. And it’s interesting. I criticize Sam Harris in two separate books. I had to stop being so obsessed with Sam Harris. But anyway, but 9/11 played a big role in this conversation because there was this assumption that Muslims look down upon all non-Muslims, see them as the damned. So then doing this research and seeing and coming across the findings I came across, I thought, huh, that’s interesting. And I think there’s some implications there.

Shadi Hamid:
Well, maybe just to add to that, because Matt and I have had this debate when we were first becoming friends and doing these talks at various Christian colleges across the country. Someone in one event, someone asked us about whether Matt wants to convert me. And I had just assumed that because we’re friends, Matt’s fine with me as I currently am. But what I found out, and now it’s obvious in retrospect, Matt is an evangelical. So by definition he’s interested in evangelizing that he would, in an ideal world, want me to be Christian.

Matthew Kaemingk:
It would destroy our podcast. If he did convert to Christianity, it would just destroy it. That is true.

Shadi Hamid:
I’m up for it.

Matthew Kaemingk:
Let’s destroy Zealots at the Gate. That’s great.

Shadi Hamid:
But then I think Matt was also surprised when he found out that I wasn’t interested in converting him to Islam because he thought, “Well, Shadi, if you really care about me, wouldn’t you want me to see the light? Wouldn’t you want to bring me closer to the religion that you believe to be true?” And I think that part of why I don’t feel very strongly about converting people to Islam, obviously I would prefer people to be Muslim than the alternative, but I’ve never felt a very strong drive precisely because I am an inclusivist. I don’t believe you have to be Muslim to get into heaven. So in some sense, I don’t need to save anyone from hellfire in that respect. But there’s a danger there because that can undermine the desire to preach and to share the good word with our Jewish or Christian or Hindu neighbours. So there’s a tension there.

Matthew Kaemingk:
And it’s confusing Shadi, because you’ve said you really would want your children to be Muslim, so you seem to care about your children, but not me, right? So what’s up?

Shadi Hamid:
Well, because in some sense, I have direct responsibility-

Matthew Kaemingk:
Okay.

Shadi Hamid:
Over my hypothetical children that you’re raising them and you have to come up with a certain way of looking at the world that you share with them.

Matthew Kaemingk:
So here’s Mohammed, I’m not going to squabble with my co-host right now, I want to talk to you. So Mohammed, in some evangelical quarters, missions and evangelism for some evangelicals can take on serve like a desperate posture. We have to tell people about Jesus or they’re going to hell. So it’s all on us. We’ve got to get out there, we’ve got to travel the world, and we’ve got to tell people about Jesus. Islam is a missional religion, right? It is an expansive religion. What is sort of the motivating passion? I see Shadi doesn’t have it, but for other Muslims to share the message of Islam. Has it ever been hell as the motivating factor or what has primarily driven Muslim expansion in the world as far as theological doctrines? If it’s not hell, what is it? Or has it been hell?

Mohammad Hassan Khalil:
That’s a good question. I grapple with this actually very briefly in my chapter on Al-Ghazali, the famous Muslim theologian who believed that most of humanity actually would be saved. And what’s interesting about Al-Ghazali is he says, “We have to spread the message. We have to tell people, we have to do what’s called Dawah.” Calling people to this is what we now, this is the term we use these days for that. And I grapple with this because on the one hand, he’s saying most people are going to be saved anyway. But I think he sees it as an extension of the Prophet’s mission. As a Muslim, my as a follower of the Prophet Muhammad, I am to convey his message even further. And the assumption is that there is benefit to people encountering the message in this life and reaching a deeper level, higher truths in this life.

Now, having said that, you’re asking though about Muslims today in general. And certainly if we think about the young version of myself, before I started all this stuff, I was reading about non-Muslims going to hell. That’s what I was reading about. That’s what I was hearing. Many Muslims do genuinely believe that, yeah, all non-Muslims go to hell, or they might be limited inclusivists, meaning they believe that once you hear about Islam, you’re responsible. And you know what? In the information age, just about every non-Muslim has heard about Islam. So we should do our part to convey the message, to encourage people to follow this path.

And I’ll say that if you look at some of the very prominent Muslim figures who proselytize on YouTube and elsewhere, they tend to be on the exclusivist side, or at least limited inclusivist side. I’m thinking here of someone like Zakir Naik, an Indian preacher who is very influential, very popular on YouTube. And in analysing his videos, I found that he tends to promote an exclusivist view, and he’s one of the most active proselytizers. So I think it’s the fact that there are so many Muslims who don’t believe that non-Muslims are all good, that kind of drives many of them to proselytize.

Shadi Hamid:
And I would maybe just add to that too, that I think there’s a difference between proselytizing to someone who is Christian and a committed Christian versus someone who’s agnostic or atheist. Because I do believe that having a sense of God in one’s life is good. It’s good, it’s true, and it also leads to better outcomes.

Matthew Kaemingk:
Okay, but how is it good, Shadi?

Shadi Hamid:
Because-

Matthew Kaemingk:
How is it good? How is it not just like fire insurance, right? I’m going to do this so I don’t go to hell. How is it good for my life now?

Shadi Hamid:
Well, I mean there’s a lot of evidence that religious people participate more in society, give more to charity, volunteer more for organisations. So there’s a societal impact that’s very important. Also, religious people tend to drink less, smoke less and be more healthy in those sorts of ways.

Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah, I’m just saying that that’s not super inspiring to my boys. They’re going to be going to college and they’re going to want to do what they want to do.

Shadi Hamid:
But we also have quite a bit of survey evidence that religious people on average tend to be more happy and be more fulfilled. They’re also more likely to get married and have kids. And we know that there’s a strong correlation between marriage and kids and happiness and contentment in one’s life. I mean, these are in strong spiritual arguments, but there is something useful. There is a utility to being religious.

Matthew Kaemingk:
Okay.

Shadi Hamid:
Sorry, is that not what you were going for? I mean-

Matthew Kaemingk:
Well, it just feels like you’re reducing Islam to a social program like it’s one option in a mall of ways to make your life a little bit better. I don’t know. I mean, Mohammad, would you say the same thing or would you push on Shadi about that?

Mohammad Hassan Khalil:
Well, I think maybe Matthew, you’re thinking about maybe from a theological perspective, right? What’s the point? And I would say, I think the logic is, okay, if you believe this is from God, then you’ll want to promote this because this gets you closer to God. If praying five times a day and fasting and Ramadan and so on, if this will bring you closer to God, then I want more people to get closer to God.

Shadi Hamid:
Yeah. But also, I think there’s even maybe a more base element to it that we want more people to be like us. So putting aside the question of salvation, there is something nice about the number of Muslims growing in America, that we’re not just static. We’re a vibrant dynamic group that is making its presence felt more in American public life. And also the more of us, the more Muslims there are in American public life, that means the more we can defend our own interests or to promote things, to promote better outcomes for the Middle East and to improve U.S. Foreign Policy.

Again, these are not theological reasons, but I think there’s a lot of different motivations that go into why you would want there to be more people of your own demographic. But even though I’m an inclusivist, I should also say again, I would prefer that people be Muslim relative to the other options. I just don’t, it’s not the driving light in my life. It’s not something that I wake up with and I’m like, “Oh, my friend Sean, I would love to convert him to Islam.” And I think that’s also a product of living in a liberal society. I am not just a product of Islam. I’m also a product of American ideals of liberal ideals. And I think there is something uncouth about really wanting to convert your fellow Americans because them being American should be enough, because that’s what we share as a body politic.

I’m not saying that’s good or right, but if I’m trying to understand what my own motivations are, I can’t disregard the fact that I’m not just a Muslim, I’m also an American, I’m also a liberal. And those things colour how I view my own participation in American public life.

Matthew Kaemingk:
Okay. Mohammad, I want to get your take on a debate that happened in our last podcast episode between Shadi and our Christian guest. Shadi was talking about the utility of the fear of hell, that being afraid of consequences has a certain social psychological utility. And she said that she didn’t believe that fear was a good way to motivate people. And I’m wondering, in the historic Muslim scholars that you were studying, how did they think about the fear of hell as a motivating factor or as sort of a proper emotion for human beings to feel? And yeah, fear versus love as motivation. What did you find in your research on that?

Mohammad Hassan Khalil:
Yeah, I think generally there’s an appreciation for both fear and what’s the word to tempt People with reward. There’s utility in both.

Matthew Kaemingk:
The carrot and the stick.

Mohammad Hassan Khalil:
The carrot and the stick. Exactly, exactly. And actually even those Muslim scholars who argue that one day everybody would leave hell and go to heaven, they would say that, I’m thinking here, Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, a 14th century scholar in Syria, he says that, look, this idea that everybody will leave hell and go to heaven, this is something for those who really, if God shines late on you, you’ll see it. But otherwise, there’s a reason why the Quran words things the way it does. It’s not obvious that everybody will leave hell and go to heaven according to him even, right? He had to kind of dig deep to get to that conclusion.

So clearly hell, the description of hell serves a purpose. And there is this worry that if you downplay that, people will just take it easy. And I remember one time describing my book to someone else and a Muslim, and when he heard about this idea that everybody would go to heaven eventually, he said, “Well, what’s the point of praying?” Now never mind the fact that the people talking about hell are still talking about a actual, physical, painful hell that would last a long time, for that person that was their first reaction. But yeah, just to go back to your question, I think that Muslims generally see utility in both the carrot and the stick.

Shadi Hamid:
And I think this goes back to the point that Muslims are not guaranteed salvation. Mohammad, maybe you can say a little bit more about the idea of hell as a purifier, that even if you’re ultimately on your way to heaven, you could spend a shorter time either in what would be the equivalent of purgatory or in hell as a way to sort of purify your sins and so forth. So that’s still a strong motivation even if you are Muslim. And I think that’s important because sometimes I’ll hear people similar to what you just said, Mohammad, where they’ll say something like, “Oh, well, God is the most merciful, God’s mercy overwhelms everything else, and therefore we don’t have to worry about, as you said, praying, fasting, upholding the other commandments of the religion.”

So I think that is a relevant danger if you do want people to practise Islam, if you do want people to observe the law, not everyone is going to be able to do that out of the goodness of their heart or out of a desire to please God. Human beings need incentives to kind of just talk about it in a kind of crass way, and hell is a powerful incentive to not do bad things.

Mohammad Hassan Khalil:
Yeah. There are some Muslims who, especially I’m thinking of some Sufi Muslims who will say, when you reach a high state of proximity to God, you don’t need the concept of hell. So I’m thinking of Rabi’a al-Adawiyah, who says, “Lord, if I worship you in fear of hell, burn me in it. And if I worship you in hope of paradise, keep me from it. But if I worship you for your own being, don’t withhold for me your everlasting beauty.”

So for some Muslims, this is the idea is that, yeah, you have the carrot and the stick for the average Muslim, but when you reach a high state, you don’t need that, you just want God. That’s one perspective. There’s another perspective that disagrees and actually says even any and every Muslim needs the carrot and the stick. And I do want to stress, I want to underline or highlight the point that you’re making. Muslims don’t know that they’re going to heaven. Generally speaking, Muslims don’t know where they’re going. And I remember when I organised a conference in 2010 on this very subject, one of the speakers said, “Look, people ask me about Mother Teresa. I don’t know where I’m going. Don’t ask me about Mother Teresa.”

Matthew Kaemingk:
Is that scary for you guys that you don’t know if you’re going to heaven or not? Is that scary?

Mohammad Hassan Khalil:
Well, I’ll say this. There’s a general assumption that you are confident in God’s mercy. And so, because of that confidence in God’s mercy, you know all will be made well in the end. But there is an openness still, there is a kind of ambiguity-

Matthew Kaemingk:
Mohammed, answer the question.

Mohammad Hassan Khalil:
Well, I suppose at the end of the day, yeah, there is going to be some fear. Sure, absolutely.

Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah.

Mohammad Hassan Khalil:
Yeah.

Shadi Hamid:
Yeah. And I can say that unequivocally, the fear of hell is something that animates me, it’s something that I think about. It’s one of the reasons that the idea of death is not something I feel very comfortable about, where I know that there’s some people who just somehow seem to be at peace with the idea of dying. It doesn’t sort of agitate them. And they’ve been able to reach this level of just contentment and calmness about the prospect.

But I don’t have that. I would love to get to a point in my life, in my own sort of Islamic commitment where I feel more calm and at peace. But I also acknowledge that it’s probably a good thing that it’s sort of lighting a fire under me to use that analogy. It kind of pushes me, it gets me going. It makes me feel I got to be better, I got to take certain things more seriously. I better not fall into temptation when it comes to that moment where it’s like 16:00 PM on a fasting day and I have a deadline, and I just feel like I really have to get this article written that I’ll be like, “Oh, man, breaking my fast. That’s pretty bad.” I probably shouldn’t do that, even though there’s a very strong or supposedly compelling reason to do so. So that’s just a very practical manifestation of how this can play out in your life. It actually does change the way that I act.

Matthew Kaemingk:
So I’m going to try to manifest Elizabeth Oldfield, who was our last guest, and her push on Shadi here in that. Yeah, it might get you to behave a little bit better, the fear of hell, right? It might stop you from making a few decisions, but I think what Elizabeth would say, and all Christians would really say is, the important thing is not just kind of modifying your behavior, it’s actually modifying your desires and your heart. And I wonder what does that look like? And I don’t know, Mohammad, if you have something to say on that particular thing. What Christians long for is not simply being a better person, but to actually have their heart aligned with God’s heart to want the right and to shun the wrong in terms of their own desires, not just out of fear of punishment. I mean, when I talk about those sort of Christian longings, how does that hit the two of you?

Mohammad Hassan Khalil:
Well, I’ll say this, even in the Islamic context, the traditional majority interpretation, there are levels to heaven and levels to hell and so on. And there is this idea that, yeah, I can do what needs to be done to just get out of hell. I can do my prayers, fast and so on, but maybe I want more than that. And there’s a notion that the higher you go in heaven, the closer you are to God, there’s more proximity to God and more. And so what you described sounds like the way I think about things. I can’t really pinpoint the psychological reasoning behind it, but I feel like that’s what I want to do. I want to be aligned with what God wants, not just because of fear of hell.

Shadi Hamid:
Yeah. Look, I think we all want to realign our desires. The problem is that it’s very challenging that the things that we want, I mean, it takes a lot of work to alter that, especially if these are deeper, more innate desires or wants, and not everyone’s going to be capable of that kind of work, that internal work, if you will, because it does require more than just doing the rituals. It requires really trying to open your heart up to God and to develop a personal relationship with him. And I think there’s just some personalities that aren’t as good at doing that. They just don’t feel it the same way that other people do, for them Islam might be more intellectual and less a matter of the heart. So for them, they may just have to focus on the ritual because that’s what they have control over. Behavior is something that we can change. Desires we can change too, but it’s more challenging.

And I think that Islam speaks to these different audiences in different ways, and there is the kind of lowest common denominator of all Muslims, and we just have to be … A lot of people just don’t have time for a lot of the intellectual or spiritual work, especially if they’re just trying to get through the day, they’re trying to get food on the table, they live a very precarious existence. There isn’t going to be as much time for them to do the spiritual work, so to speak. And that’s, I think a great thing about Islam is that it’s able to speak to different Muslims at different levels.

Mohammad Hassan Khalil:
If I may make an analogy, let’s say my daughter doesn’t want to go to school, she does not want to go to school. And I say, well, I’m going to, I don’t know, take this toy away or whatever. So she goes to school, and then while she’s at school, she realises she loves school, she likes math actually, she actually likes math and she gets into it. But she needed that initial push to get her there. And so that’s where I would, to my mind, maybe the benefit of the stick is that for some people it actually gets them now to realise, oh, now they can see other things once they get there.

Matthew Kaemingk:
Sort of Aristotelian, fake it until you make it, right? So go to school until you love it.

Mohammad Hassan Khalil:
Perhaps, perhaps.

Matthew Kaemingk:
The beatings will continue until morale improves. Yeah, and I do think so, I’m sure my Christian listeners, I often get notes of, “Why don’t you tell Shadi this? Or why don’t you tell Shadi that?” Yeah, but I think in general, for the Christian in this kind of discussion, I think we might have more of an understanding of the human being as porous, that I’m not capable of changing myself, that I actually need God to invade my life and change my heart because I can’t change my heart. I’m incapable of changing my behavior right, day after day I try to do this thing and I keep failing. I keep failing. And so there’s this, from the Christian point of view, much more of a helpless and a sort of porous posture of, God, I actually need you to come inside and mess with my internal framework because there’s something wrong down here. It’s not just the behavior that’s up above the surface, but there’s actually something misaligned within my heart.

Mohammad Hassan Khalil:
I think in the Islamic tradition, there’s something, I’m not going to say it’s the same. But there is something, it reminds me of something which is that often we pray to, even in the opening chapter of the Quran, Muslims are praying for guidance. They can’t do it on their own. They’re asking for God to guide them. Even the Prophet Muhammad himself is asking God to guide him. And there are times where he’s quoted as saying, “The one who can turn the heart,” and he’s asking God to turn his heart a certain direction. So I think there’s something, I’m not going to say it’s the same, but it reminds me of that in the Islamic tradition.

Shadi Hamid:
And certainly we’re not expected or meant to be self-sufficient, that ultimately we need God to be the kinds of people we want to be. In Islam, though, there is a sense that we have to put in the kind of initial work. We have to show that we are committed, and then God will meet us halfway and help to further open up our hearts. It’s not something that necessarily happens just because we want it to be so, or just because we ask God, we have to show God something beyond the mere asking. So for example, if we’re not doing our prayers and we’re not fasting, but then we’re expecting God to open up our hearts, it’s almost like we want to have our cake and eat it. God wants to see like, “Hey, Shadi, come on. Get in there. You know what you’re supposed to do. At least kind of I want to see you walk in my direction.”

Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah, yeah. All right, I’m going to pivot again. You guys have been good sports, I’ve been pushing the two of you. I want to talk about something, Mohammed, that I think I heard you say, and I think I really like it. And it has to do back on the topic of politics. It really does, I loved your caution in your response to me when I asked What are the political implications? Because I do come across more progressive or modern Christians who have maybe what you would describe as a very sort of generous understanding of salvation. And sometimes they have sort of the assumption that if I have a generous understanding of salvation, I will therefore be more generous politically to people that I disagree with. But I argue that that’s not at all the case. That having a generous view of everyone going to heaven does not necessarily make you more tolerant today. In fact, you can be quite intolerant of people.

Similarly, I have met people with very exclusivist understandings of their religion who have been incredibly generous to people who are different from them. Some of them, as you said, because they desperately want to invite people into their faith because of the urgency of it, but others, because they have a very clear command from God that they must love their neighbours. And so I really appreciated your caution with regard to combining a sort of salvation generosity with a political generosity because I see those things not at all being connected to one another. And I wonder if you might expand on that a little bit from your vantage point.

Mohammad Hassan Khalil:
Interesting. Yeah, I mean, I think because I myself had adopted an exclusivist view growing up, and I should tell you my own view now is I just say, “Allah Hu Alam.” God knows best. I don’t have a concrete view. But yeah, growing up as having been taught that sort of exclusivist message, not necessarily by my parents, but by scholars and others, I lived it. I, myself was generous to others because I wanted what was best for them.

But I will say this, if Sean rubbed me the wrong way, in my mind I might think, “well, at least I’m not going to … ” but this is me as a child, mind you. But anyway, but the point is that, and I know today many people in my community who are exclusivists, who are the nicest people you’ll ever see, they’re very generous with in helping others and helping society and so on. So yeah, I remember actually a few years ago, I want to say it was Bernie Sanders who made the point that if you believe that only you are going to heaven … I forgot what he said, but he was criticizing this idea among Americans and rejecting, denying that this is what Muslims believe, or something along those lines. And I was asked, somebody had asked me about this, and I said, well, many Muslims do believe this, but that doesn’t mean that it’s something necessarily negative or bad for society.

Shadi Hamid:
But Matt, if I could just add to this, because I do wonder though, if someone’s being really nice to someone else who’s not of their religion, but it’s because of an ulterior motive that they want to be gentle and friendly and generous in order to convert that person. It almost sort of takes some of the essence of the act away that you’re not doing it because you’re a genuinely good person who cares for the welfare of your friend or neighbour. You’re doing it because you want to convert them. Is there a risk of that something sounds almost like a little bit-

Matthew Kaemingk:
Absolutely there is.

Shadi Hamid:
Oh, okay, good.

Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah. No, no, absolutely there is. I mean, let’s just be very personal, Shadi, right? You and me, my Christian ethic of how I respond to you. The foundational reason I’m kind to you is not because you’re not a project to me, you’re not an evangelistic project. You’re a human being who’s made in the image of God, who’s loved by God, who’s worthy of respect. That said, I do have a responsibility to tell you about Jesus, right? That is part of my life. That’s part of my understanding of what it means to honour God, is to tell you what I’ve experienced in Jesus. But foundationally, you’re a human being worthy of respect and friendship and all of those things. So that’s how I would sort of layer those things.

And what evangelicals can do sometimes, my beloved evangelicals, I’m one, can forget that you’re a human being and can turn you into a project, right? But I would argue every ideology in religion can do that. Every ideology in religion, be it political or whatever, can turn human beings into projects rather than as ends in and of themselves. I don’t know if you have seen your Muslim brothers and sisters turn human beings into projects, but-

Shadi Hamid:
We’ve seen it. It happens. But that’s a good reminder, Matt, to say that human beings should not be means to other ends, that we are ends unto ourselves. Amen to that. And maybe that’s a good optimistic note upon which to end. I want to just say thank you so much, Mohammad, for joining us. I mean, your insights on this, it’s a very challenging topic, so we really value what you had to say and kind of walking us through the difficult territory of salvation. And I do want to remind all our listeners and viewers, if you liked what you heard from Mohammad, but even if you didn’t, quite honestly, to check out his book. Again, it’s called, “Islam and the Fate of Others: The Salvation Question.”